While most adaptation studies are organized around literary works, this book takes as its starting point British film production during World War Two. It situates four cinematic appropriations and one adaptation of Shakespeare—Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith, Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started, Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V—within wartime culture. The Introduction describes the book’s method, which is to develop a synchronic film history centered upon the “wartime Shakespeare topos” (or WST), a flexible cultural trope that links Shakespeare to national identity. While the WST was deployed to articulate what binds the British people together, it was also often used in period film to register social and cultural differences within the nation. In this regard, British cinema gives us a Shakespeare who simultaneously undergirds national identity and traces the fault lines within it.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) are often considered to be both the beginning and the end of surrealist cinema. But such hasty contentions obscure a rich tradition of surrealist filmmaking. This chapter discusses the defining characteristics of Buñuel and Dalí’s pioneering films, before proceeding to demonstrate that while the broader surrealist film tradition is notably indebted to these early experiments, it is also marked by an astounding heterogeneity. Surrealist filmmakers in France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia have employed a range of formats, including documentary, feature film, and animation, from the 1930s up to the present. Providing an overview of surrealist film in a wider context, the chapter looks at how Michel Zimbacca’s documentary films interrogate notions of Western supremacy, Nelly Kaplan’s feature films depict anarchic revolts against patriarchy, and Jan Švankmajer’s films use animation to give life to inert matter in inventive ways.